A Note on a High-Energy Limit of Gravitational Perturbation Theory

Abstract: The post-Minkowskian expansion of general relativity expands the metric in Newton's constant G around flat space-time, but much effort currently focuses on ways to extend its range of applicability by summing the perturbative series to all orders. A regime of particular interest is a specific high-energy limit where a formula derived recently provides the momentum kick of binary scattering problem to all orders, and even suggests an approach towards strong coupling. We show that this is an asymptotic expansion. Although the series diverges we give evidence that it is Borel summable, and the full function in integral form is finite. As a by-product we determine the transcendentality properties of the coefficients in the expanded expression.